24 IMP BRAZZELLI 12-11-2010 15:25 Pagina 365 365 Nicoletta Brazzelli A VIEW OF AFRICA FROM THE SKY: BERYL MARKHAM AND THE FEMALE GAZE 1. “I am a wanderer”: a woman in search of freedom Beryl Markham rose to fame in 1936, when she succeeded in fly- ing solo the Atlantic1. She took off at Abington, in England, on 4th September, to reach New York after 21 hours, through fog and rain. She was the first woman to cross the ocean nonstop alone, and the first person to do it from East to West, against the prevailing winds2. It is true that, with her Messenger, a Percival Vega Gull, she was forced to an emergency landing on a swampy terrain in Nova Scotia, at Cape Breton. The press, however, soon transformed her into a star: the historic flight made newspaper headlines, and the record- breaking aviatrix fired the imagination of the public. She was a beau- tiful and elegant lady, her many love affairs were much debated, arousing the general curiosity, and she was admired for her skills but also for her unconventional way of life. Wedged between two cul- tures, the African and the European, she experienced different yet parallel lives and she refused to conform either to African or to Euro- pean conventions and social rules3. Born in Leicestershire in 1902, at only two she had arrived in Kenya with her parents; in that British colony, at Njoro, about 70 miles from Nairobi, her father, Charles Clutterbuck, a high-born army officer who breeded and trained racehorses, had set up a farm4. 1 The quotation “I am a wanderer” is taken from Markham (2001: 241). 2 The first solo flight across the Atlantic was made in 1927 by the American pilot Charles Lindbergh, who took 33 hours and a half from New York to Paris. 3 The two most authoritative biographies of Beryl Markham (1902-1986) are Lovell (1987) and Trzebinski (1995). 4 The Clutterbuck family, like many other pioneer families who, at the beginning of the XX century, bought their plots of land in Kenya, took advantage of the favourable situation: at that time, the UK government strongly encouraged the English settlement in British East Africa. For the question of the exploitation of the Kenyan land, see Mau- ghan-Brown (1985) and Kennedy (1987). Cf. also Brazzelli (2004: 25-29). 24 IMP BRAZZELLI 12-11-2010 15:25 Pagina 366 366 After her mother went back to England, Beryl, still a young girl, was left completely free to join the Nandi workers of the plantation, wandering barefoot in the Rongay Valley or entering the cedar forests of the Mau Escarpment. Swahili, spoken by many of her fa- ther’s employees, was her first language; she also learned to wield local weapons, to hunt wild game and to ride horses. In 1920 her fa- ther sold his estate and moved to South America; Beryl, instead, de- cided to stay alone in Kenya, to breed horses and train them for the races. Her passion for horses and races marked her youth; she won the most prestigious prizes and became one of the most socially prominent young women in Nairobi. In 1931 she obtained a pilot’s license; two crucial encounters en- couraged her to develop a passion for airplanes and for flying, and changed her life completely. The first one was the meeting with Tom Campbell Black, the pilot of a private Kenya airline, the second with Denys Finch Hatton, Karen Blixen’s lover, a famous “white hunter”, one of the first persons to own a plane in Africa. Immediately after, Markham began to work as a bush pilot, in charge of delivering mail, medical supplies and equipment, and was employed for reconnais- sance missions over remote and inaccessible areas, to rescue missing explorers, and for other tasks. She also flied a great number of pas- sengers, especially tourists, and with Bror Blixen, another well- known big-game hunter, started up a new kind of safari, locating ele- phants from the sky. A sort of between-the-wars celebrity, pursued and hunted by the press for her marriages and divorces, in the United States she met her third husband, Raoul Schumacher, a journalist and ghostwriter. They married in 1941. From 1950 to her death, she always lived in Africa, most of all in Kenya, showing to be deeply attached to the land where she had grown up, and achieved literary fame producing a work that is considered a masterpiece of aeronautical and travel lite- rature. 2. West with the Night: between autobiography and travel writing “Memory in ink”: in that way the writer defines her work at the end of West with the Night, published in 1942 and immediately grant- ed the status of a best-seller; a mixture of log, diary, memoir, it dis- plays the features of a very peculiar narrative, based on the author’s 5 On the connection between autobiography and travel writing in women’s texts, see Ascari - Monticelli - Fortunati (2001: 5-16). Women’s travel writing has always been 24 IMP BRAZZELLI 12-11-2010 15:25 Pagina 367 367 aerial travels over the African skies5. West with the Night is a kind of “bildungsroman”, covering Markham’s childhood and her expe- riences first with horses and then with planes6. In 1983 the American restaurateur George Gutekunst and the novelist Evan Connell pro- posed to re-publish what they called “a lost masterpiece”; the book was released in the United States by the North Point Press and sold over a million copies7. Martha Gellhorn, in her introduction to the 1984 English edition (Virago), suggests that West with the Night is a love letter to Africa, a complementary book to Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa (1937), which, through the category of romance, develops the trope of the love af- fair with Africa represented as Eden, a place of freedom and regene- ration. Only after Markham’s death, in 1986, the question of authorship was raised. In 1987 Scott O’Dell, a scriptwriter who had worked with Raoul Schumacher, sent a letter to Vanity Fair, claiming that the book had been written by Markham’s husband. According to Errol Trzebinski, the text was undoubtedly written by Raoul Schumacher: a series of circumstances seem to validate Trzebinski’s opinion (Trze- binski 1995: 233-246). In contrast, other scholars, and especially Mary Lovell, confirm the authenticity of Markham’s work (Lovell 1987). Ac- cording to Robert O’Brien, the question of authorship has no real rel- evance8. Maybe Schumacher helped Beryl to give an order to her memoirs, thanks to his literary background. On the whole, West with the Night can be truly defined as a woman’s autobiography, although its narrator does adopt some typi- cally male attitudes; the female voice strives to represent herself as a sort of imperial hero, who conquers and domesticates the space of the colony9. The protagonist does not always depict herself as a woman: such gender bending is the main source for ambiguity in Markham’s work. The tropes of women’s travel writing unfold in a situated within complex social, cultural and historical forces. The question of gender in the contemporary analysis of travel accounts is crucial. 6 On “literary” African childhoods in colonial (and postcolonial) women’s writings, cf. Simoes da Silva (2002). 7 In 1987 a television documentary on Markham’s life was produced by George Gutekunst, entitled “World Without Walls”. 8 O’Brien (1996) agrees with Hemingway, who defined West with the Night “a bloody wonderful book” and suggests that the problem of authorship regarding West with the Night is not important at all, because the text is very rich and full of charm, and it does not matter if Schumacher helped Beryl. O’Brien’s article is based on deconstruc- tionist theories. 9 On the ambiguous position of English women in Africa see Lewis (2003: 18). 24 IMP BRAZZELLI 12-11-2010 15:25 Pagina 368 368 very peculiar way in West with the Night, which is, at the same time, inside and outside the “canon” of the female travel narrative10. If tra- vel has always been the domain of masculinity, the mobility of women came as an effect of modernity and women travellers were singled out as examples of the new feminine freedom, made possible by the modern technologies of motion. Actually, the search for feminine identity, that is the main pattern of women’s travel writing, is revisited by Markham from a very am- biguous perspective: as a woman of action performing masculine deeds as a pilot, she identifies herself with a man, or maybe with an androgynous creature. As a consequence, also the masculine logic of travel is renegotiated, as well as the traditional codes of men’s adven- tures. West with the Night purports to be the narrative of the author’s childhood and youth, and its most remarkable features are Markham’s passion for racehorses and planes (Giordani 2002: 91-92). Thus, Africa is represented as the place of adventures and freedom; the colonial space opens wide before a colonizer’s daughter, who seems to identify herself more with the natives than with the con- querors. Markham’s presentation develops an elegiac tone, a some- what nostalgic pattern: the “pastoral theme” discloses itself in a man- ner similar to the narrative construction of Blixen’s Out of Africa 11: however, while Karen Blixen represents herself as a “sorceress- queen”, Markham sees herself as a “knight-errant”, who hunts fabu- lous beasts in the wilderness, beats the “villains” at the races, risks her life to rescue pilots in danger; finally, she is able to achieve her greatest quest by crossing the Atlantic ocean, alone, by night (Knipp 1990).